The Rolling Stones

IV - ASPECTS OF DOMESTIC ENGINEERING

Mr. Stone did not show his ship's organisation bill to the rest of the family; he knew in his heart that the twins were coming along, but he was not ready to concede it publicly. The subject was not mentioned while they were overhauling the ship and getting it ready for space.

The twins did most of the work with Hazel supervising and their father, from time to time, arguing with her about her engineering decisions. When this happened the twins usually went ahead and did it in the way they thought it ought to be done. Neither of them had much confidence in the skill and knowledge of their elders; along with their great natural tal­ent for mechanics and their general brilliance went a cocksure, half-baked conceit which led them to think that they knew a great deal more than they did.

This anarchistic and unstable condition came to a head over the overhaul of the intermediate injector sequence. Mr. Stone had decreed, with Hazel concurring, that all parts which could be disassembled would so be, interior surfaces inspected, toler­ances checked, and gaskets replaced with new ones. The inter­mediate sequence in this model was at comparatively low pressure; the gasketing was of silicone-silica laminate rather than wrung metal.

Spare gaskets were not available in Luna city, but had to be ordered up from Earth; this Mr. Stone had done. But the old gaskets appeared to be in perfect condition, as Pollux pointed when they opened the sequence. "Hazel, why don't we put these back in? They look brand new."

His grandmother took one of the gaskets, looked it over, flexed it, and handed it back. "Lots of life left in it; that's sure. Keep it for a spare."

Castor said, "That wasn't what Pol said. The new gaskets have to be flown from Rome to Pikes Peak, then jumped here. Might be three days, or it might be a week. And we can't do another thing until we get this mess cleaned up."

"You can work in the control room. Your father wants all new parts on everything that wears out."

"Oh, bother! Dad goes too much by the book; you've said so yourself."

Hazel looked up at her grandson, bulky in his pressure suit­. "Listen, runt, your father is an A-one engineer. I'm privileged to criticise him; you aren't."

Pollux cut in hastily, "Just a Sec, Hazel, let's keep personali­ties out of this. I want your unbiased professional opinion; are those gaskets fit to put back in, or aren't they? Cross your heart and shame the devil."

"Well... I say they are fit to use. You can tell your father I said so. He ought to be here any minute now; I expect he will agree." She straightened up. "I've got to go."

Mr. Stone failed to show up when expected. The twins fiddled around, doing a little preliminarv work on the preheater. Finally Pollux said, "What time is it?"

"Past four."

"Dad won't show up this afternoon. Look, those gaskets are all right and, anyhow, two gets you five he'd never know the difference."

"Well - he would okay them if he saw them."

"Hand me that wrench."

Hazel did show up again but by then they had the sequence put back together and had opened up the preheater. She did not ask about the injector sequence but got down on her belly with a flashlight and mirror and inspected the preheater's interior. Her frail body, although still agile as a cricket under the Moon's weak pull, was not up to heavy work with a wrench, but her eyes were sharper - and much more experienced - than those of the twins. Presently she wiggled out. "Looks good," she announced. "We'll put it back together tomorrow. Let's go see what the cook ruined tonight." She helped them disconnect their oxygen hoses from the ship's tank and reconnect to their back packs, then the three went down out of the ship and back to Luna City.

Dinner was monopolised by a hot argument over the next installment of The Scourge of the Spaceways. Hazel was still writing it but the entire family, with the exception of Dr. Stone, felt free to insist on their own notions of just what forms of mayhem. and violence the characters should indulge in next. It was not until his first pipe after dinner that Mr. Stone got around to inquiring about the day's progress.

Castor explained that they were about to close up the pre­heater. Mr. Stone nodded. "Moving right along - good! Wait a minute; You'll just have to tear it down again to put in the - Or did they send those gaskets out to the ship? I didn't think they had come in yet?"

"What gaskets?" Pollux said innocently. Hazel glanced quickly at him but said nothing.

"The gaskets for the intermediate injector sequence, of course."

"Oh, those!" Pollux shrugged. "They were okay, absolutely perfect to nine decimal places - so we put 'em back in."

"Oh, you did? That's interesting. Tomorrow you can take them out again - and I'll stand over you when you put the new ones in."

Castor took over. "But Dad, Hazel said they were okay!"

Roger Stone looked at his mother. "Well, Hazel?"

She hesitated. She knew that she had not been sufficiently emphatic in telling the twins that their father's engineering instructions were to be carried out to the letter; on the other hand she had told them to check with him. Or had she? 'The gaskets were okay, Roger. No harm done."

He looked at her thoughtfully. "So you saw fit to change my instructions? Hazel, are you itching to be left behind?"

She noted the ominously gentle tone of his voice and checked an angry reply. "No," she said simply.

""No" what?"

"No, Captain."

"Not captain yet, perhaps, but that's the general idea." He turned to his sons. "I wonder if you two yahoos understand the nature of this situation?"

Castor bit his lip. Pollux looked at his twin, then back at his father. "Dad, you're the one who doesn't understand the nature of the situation. You're making a fuss over nothing. If it'll give you any satisfaction, we'll open it up again - but you'll simply see that we were right. If you had seen those gaskets, you would have passed them."

"Probably. Almost certainly. But a skipper's orders as to how he wants his ship gotten ready for space are not subject to change by a dockyard mechanic - which is what you both rate at the moment. Understand me?"

"Okay, so we should have waited: Tomorrow we'll open her up, you'll see that we were right and we'll close it up again."

"Wrong. Tomorrow you will go out, open it up, and bring the old gaskets back to me. Then you will both stay right here at home until the new gaskets arrive. You can spend the time con­templating the notion that orders are meant to be carried out."

Castor said, "Now just a minute, Dad! You'll put us days behind."

Pollux added, "Not to mention the hours of work you are making us waste already."

Castor: "You can't expect us to get the ship ready if you insist on jiggling our elbows!"

Pollux: "And don't forget the money we're saving you."

Castor: "Right! It's not costing you a square shilling!"

Pollux: "And yet you pull this "regulation skipper" act on us."

Castor: "Discouraging! That's what it is!"

"Pipe down!" Without waiting for them to comply he stood up and grasped each of them by the scruff of his jacket. Luna's one-sixth gravity permitted him to straight-arm them both; he held them high up off the floor and wide apart. They struggled helplessly, unable to reach anything.

"Listen to me," he ordered. "Up to now I hadn't quite decided whether to let you two wild men go along or not. But now my mind's made up."

There was a short silence from the two, then Pollux said mournfully, "You mean we don't go?"

"I mean you do go. You need a taste of strict ship's discipline a durn sight more than you need to go to school; these modern schools aren't tough enough for the likes of you. I mean to run a taut ship - prompt, cheerful obedience, on the bounce! Or I throw the book at you. Understand me? Castor?"

"Uh, yes, sir."

"Pollux?"

"Ayeaye,sir!"

"See that you remember it. Pull a fast-talk like that on me when we're in space and I'll stuff you down each other's throat." He cracked their heads together smartly and threw them away.

The next day, on the way back from the field with the old gaskets, the twins stopped for a few minutes at the city library. They spent the four days they had to wait boning up on space law. They found it rather sobering reading, particularly the part which asserted that a commanding officer in space, acting independently, may and must maintain his authority against any who might attempt to usurp or dispute it. Some of the cited cases were quite grisly. They read of a freighter captain who, in his capacity as chief magistrate, had caused a mutineer to be shoved out an airlock, there to rupture his lungs in the vacuum of space, drown in his own blood

Pollux made a face. "Grandpa," he inquired, "how would you like to be spaced?"

"No future in it. Thin stuff, vacuum. Low vitamin content"

"Maybe we had better be careful not to irritate Dad. This "captain" pose has gone to his head."

"It's no pose. Once we raise ship it's legal as church on Sunday. But Dad won't space us, no matter what we do."

"Don't count on it. Dad is a very tough hombre when he forgets that he's a loving father"

"Junior, you worry too much."

"So? When you feel the pressure drop remember what I said."

It had been early agreed that the ship could not stay the Cherub. There had been no such agreement on what the new name should be. After several noisy arguments Dr. Stone, who herself had no special preference, suggested that they place a box on the dining table into which proposed names might be placed without debate. For one week the slips accumulated; then the box was opened.

Dr. Stone wrote them down:

Dauntless Icarus

Jabberwock Susan B. Anthony

H. M. S. Pinafore Iron Duke

The Clunker Morning Star

Star Wagon Tumbleweed

Go-Devil Oom Paul

Onward Viking

" One would think," Roger grumbled, "that with all the self-declared big brains there are around this table someone would show some originality. Almost every name on the list can be found in the Big Register - half of them for ships still in commission. I move we strike out those tired, second-hand, wed-before names and consider only fresh ones."

Hazel looked at him suspiciously. "What ones will that leave?"

"Well -"

"You've looked them up, haven't you? I thought I caught you sneaking a look at the slips before breakfast."

"Mother, "your allegation is immaterial, irrelevant, and unworthy of you."

"But true. Okay; let's have a vote. Or does someone want to make a campaign speech?"

Dr. Stone rapped on the table with her thimble. "We'll vote. I've still got a medical association meeting to get to tonight." As chairman she ruled that any name receiving less than two votes in the first round would be eliminated. Secret ballot was used; when Meade canvassed the vote, seven names had gotten one vote each, none had received two.

Roger Stone pushed back his chair. "Agreement from this family is too much to expect . I'm going to bed. Tomorrow morning I'm going to register her as the R. S. Deadlock."

" Daddy, you wouldn't!" Meade protested.

"Just watch me. The R. S. Hair Shirt might be better. Or the R. S. Madhouse."

" Not bad," agreed Hazel. "It sounds like us. Never a dull moment."

"I, for one," retorted her son, "could stand a little decent monotony."

"Rubbish! We thrive on trouble. Do you want to get covered with moss?"

"What's "moss", Grandma Hazell?" Lowell demanded.

"Huh? It's... well, it's what rolling stones don't gather."

Roger snapped his fingers. "Hazel, you've just named the ship."

"Eh? Come again."

"The Rolling Stones. No, the Rolling Stone."

Dr. Stone glanced up. "I like that, Roger."

"Meade?"

"Sounds good, Daddy."

"Hazel?"

"This is one of your brighter days, son."

"Stripped of the implied insult, I take it that means "yes.""

"I don't like it," objected Pollux. "Castor and I plan to gather quite a bit of moss."

"It's four to three, even if you get Buster to go along with you and your accomplice. Overruled. The Roiling Stone it is."

Despite their great sizes and tremendous power spaceships are surprisingly simple machines. Every technology goes through three stages: first, a crudely simple and quite unsatisfactory gadget; second, an enormously complicated group of gadgets designed to overcome the shortcomings of the original and achieving thereby somewhat satisfactory performance through extremely complex compromise; third, a final stage of smooth simplicity and efficient performance based on correct under-standing of natural laws and proper design therefrom.

In transportation, the ox cart and the rowboat represent the first stage of technology.

The second stage might well be represented by the automobiles of the middle twentieth century just before the open­ing of interplanetary travel. These unbelievable museum pieces were for the time fast, sleek and powerful -. but inside their skins were assembled a preposterous collection of mechanical buffoonery. The prime mover for such a juggernaut might have rested in one's lap; the rest of the mad assembly consisted of afterthoughts intended to correct the uncorrectable, to repair the original basic mistake in design - for automobiles and even the early aeroplanes were 'powered' (if one may call it that) by 'reciprocating engines."

A reciprocating engine was a collection of miniature heat engines using (in a basically inefficient cycle) a small percentage of an exothermic chemical reaction, a reaction which was started and stopped every split second. Much of the heat was intentionally thrown away into a 'water jacket' or 'cooling system," then wasted into the atmosphere through a heat exchanger.

What little was left caused blocks of metal to thump foolishly back-and-forth (hence the name 'reciprocating') and thence through a linkage to cause a shaft and flywheel to spin around. The flywheel (believe it if you can) had no gyroscopic function; it was used to store kinetic energy in a futile attempt to cover up the sins of reciprocation. The shaft at long last caused wheels to turn and thereby propelled this pile of junk over the countryside.

The prime mover was used only to accelerate and to overcome 'friction' - a concept then in much wider engineering use. To decelerate, stop, or turn the heroic human operator used their own muscle power, multiplied precariously through a series of levers.

Despite the name 'automobile' these vehicles had no auto­control circuits; control, such as it was, was exercised second by second for hours on end by a human being peering out through a small pane of dirty silica glass, and judging unassisted and often disastrously his own motion and those of other objects. In almost all cases the operator had no notion of the kinetic energy stored in his missile and could not have written the basic equation. Newton's Laws of Motion were to him mysteries as profound as the meaning of the universe.

Nevertheless millions of these mechanical jokes swarmed over our home planet, dodging each other by inches or failing to dodge. None of them ever worked right; by their nature they could not work right; and they were constantly getting out of order. Their operators were usually mightily pleased when they worked at all. When they did not, which was every few hundred miles (hundred, not hundred thousand) they hired a member of a social class of arcane specialists to make inadequate and always expensive temporary repairs.

Despite their mad shortcomings, these 'automobiles' were the most characteristic form of wealth and the most cherished possessions of their time. Three whole generations were slaves to them.

The Rolling Stone was the third stage of technology. Her power plant was nearly 100% efficient, and, save for her gyro-scopes, she contained almost no moving parts - the power plant used no moving parts at all; a rocket engine is the simplest of all possible heat engines. Castor and Pollux might have found themselves baffled by the legendary Model-T Ford automobile, but the Roiling Stone was not nearly that complex, she was merely much larger. Many of the fittings they had to handle were very massive, but the Moon's one-sixth gravity was an enormous advantage; only occasionally did they have to resort to handling equipment.

Having to wear a vacuum suit while doing mechanic's work was a handicap but they were not conscious of it. They had worn space suits whenever they were outside the pressurised underground city since before they could remember; they worked in them and wore them without thinking about them, as their grandfather had worn overalls. They conducted the entire overhaul without pressurising the ship because it was such a nuisance to have to be forever cycling an airlock, dress­ing and undressing, whenever they wanted anything outside the ship.

An IBM company representative from the city installed the new ballistic computer and ran it in, but after he had gone the boys took it apart and checked it throughout themselves, being darkly suspicious of any up-check given by a manu­facturer's employee. The ballistic computer of a space ship has to be right; without perfect performance from it a ship is a mad robot, certain to crash and kill its passengers. The new computer was of the standard 'I-tell-you-three-times' variety, a triple brain each third of which was capable of solving the whole problem; if one triplet failed, the other two would out-vote it and cut it off from action, permitting thereby at least one perfect landing and a chance to correct the failure.

The twins made personally sure that the multiple brain was sane in all its three lobes, then, to their disgust, their father and grandmother checked everything that they had done.

The last casting had been x-rayed, the last metallurgical report had been received from the spaceport laboratories, the last piece of tubing had been reinstalled and pressure tested; it was time to move the Rolling Stone from Dan Ekizian's lot to the port, where a technician of the Atomic Energy Com­mission - a grease monkey with a Ph.D - would install and seal the radioactive bricks which fired her 'boiler." There, too, she would take on supplies and reactive mass, stablised mon-atomic hydrogen; in a pinch the Rolling Stone could eat anything, but she performed best on 'single-H."

The night before the ship was to be towed to the spaceport the twins tackled their father on a subject dear to their hearts - money. Castor made an indirect approach. "See here, Dad, we want to talk with you seriously."

"So? Wait till I phone my lawyer."

"Aw, Dad! Look, we just want to know whether or not you've made up your mind where we are going?"

"Eh? What do you care? I've already promised you that it will be some place new to you. We won't go to Earth, nor to Venus, not this trip."

"Yes, but where?"

" I may just close my eyes, set up a prob on the computer by touch, and see what happens. If the prediction takes us close to any rock bigger than the ship, we'll scoot off and have a look at it. That's the way to enjoy travelling."

Pollux said, "But, Dad, you can't load a ship if you don't know where it's going."

Castor glared at him; Roger Stone stared at him. "Oh," he said slowly, "I begin to see. But don't worry about it. As skipper, it is my responsibility to see that we have whatever we need aboard before we blast."

Dr. Stone said quietly, "Don't tease them, Roger."

"I'm not teasing."

"You're managing to tease me, Daddy," Meade said suddenly. "Let's settle it. I vote for Mars."

Hazel said, "The deuce it ain't!"

"Pipe down, Mother. Time was, when the senior male mem­ber of a family spoke, everybody did what he -"

"Roger, if you think I am going to roll over and play dead-"

"I said, "pipe down." But everybody in this family thinks it's funny to try to get around Pop. Meade sweet-talks me. The twins fast-talk me. Buster yells until he gets what he wants. Hazel bullies me and pulls seniority." He looked at his wife. "You, too, Edith. You give in until you get your own way."

"Yes, dear."

"See what I mean? You all think papa is a schnook. But I'm not. I've got a soft head, a pliable nature, and probably the lowest I.Q. in the family, but this clambake is going to be run to suit me."

"What's a clambake?" Lowell wanted to know.

"Keep your child quiet, Edith."

"Yes, dear."

"I'm going on a picnic, a wanderjahr. Anyone who wants to come along is invited. But I refuse to deviate by as much as a million miles from whatever trajectory suits me. I bought this ship from money earned in spite of the combined opposition of my whole family; I did not touch one thin credit of the money I hold in trust for our two young robber barons - and I don't propose to let them run the show."

Dr. Stone said quietly, "They merely asked where we were going. I would like to know, too."

"So they did. But why? Castor, you want to know so that you can figure a cargo, don't you?"

"Well - yes. Anything wrong with that? Unless we know what market we're taking it to, we won't know what to stock."

"True enough. But I don't recall authorising any such com­mercial ventures. The Rolling Stone is a family yacht."

Pollux cut in with, "For the love of Pete, Dad! With all that cargo space just going to waste, you'd think that -"

"An empty hold gives us more cruising range."

"But -"

"Take it easy. This subject is tabled for the moment. What do you two propose to do about your education?"

Castor said, "I thought that was settled. You said we could go along."

"That part is settled. But we'll be coming back this way in a year or two. Are you prepared to go down to Earth to school then - and stay there - until you get your degrees?"

The twins looked at each other; neither one of them said anything. Hazel butted in: "Quit being so offensively orthodox, Roger. I'll take over their education. I'll give them the straight data. What they taught me in school darn near ruined me, before I got wise and started teaching myself."

Roger Stone looked bleakly at his mother. "You would teach them, all right. No, thanks, I prefer a somewhat more normal approach."

""Normal!" Roger, that's a word with no meaning."

"Perhaps not, around here. But I'd like the twins to grow up as near normal as possible."

"Roger, have you ever met any normal people? I never have. The so-called normal man is a figment of the imagination; every member of the human race, from Jojo the cave man right down to that final culmination of civilisation, namely me, has been as eccentric as a pet coon - once you caught him with his mask off."

"I won't dispute the part about yourself."

"It's true for everybody. You try to make the twins "normal" and you'll simply stunt their growth."

Roger Stone stood up. "That's enough. Castor, Pollux - come with me. Excuse us, everybody."

"Yes, dear."

"Sissy," said Hazel. "I was just warming up to my rebuttal."

He led them into his study, closed the door. "Sit down."

The twins did so. "Now we can settle this quietly. Boys, I'm quite serious about your education. You can do what you like with your lives - turn pirate or get elected to the Grand Council. But I won't let you grow up ignorant."

Castor answered, "Sure, Dad, but we do study. We study all the time. You've said yourself that we are better engineers than half the young snots that come up from Earth."

"Granted. But it's not enough. Oh, you can learn most things on your own but I want you to have a formal, disciplined, really sound grounding in mathematics."

"Huh? Why, we cut our teeth on differential equations!"

Pollux added, "We know Hudson's Manual by heart We can do a triple integration in our heads faster than Hazel can. If there's one thing we do know, it's mathematics."

Roger Stone shook his head sadly. "You can count on your fingers but you can't reason. You probably think that the interval from zero to one is the same as the interval from ninety-nine to one hundred."

"Isn't it?"

"Is it? If so, can you prove it?" Their father reached up to the spindles on the wall, took down a book spool, and inserted it in the to his study projector. He spun the selector, stopped with a page displayed on the wall screen. It was a condensed chart of fields of mathematics invented, thus far by the human mind. "Let's see you find your way around that page."

The twins blinked at it. In the upper left-hand corner of the chart they spotted the names of subjects they had studied; the rest of the array was unknown territory; in most cases they did not even recognise the names of the subjects. In the ordinary engineering forms of the calculus they actually were adept; they had not been boasting. They knew enough of vector analysis to find their way around unassisted in electrical engineering and electronics; they knew classical geometry and trigonometry well enough for the astrogating of a space ship, and they had had enough of non-Euclidean geometry, tensor calculus, statistical mechanics, and quantum theory to get along with an atomic power plant

But it had never occurred to them that they had not yet really penetrated the enormous and magnificent field of mathematics.

"Dad," asked Pollux in a small voice, "what's a "hyperideal"?"

"Time you found out."

Castor looked quickly at his father. "How many of these things have you studied, Dad?"

"Not enough. Not nearly enough. But my sons should know more than I do."

It was agreed that the twins would study mathematics inten­sively the entire time the family was in space, and not simply under the casual supervision of their father and grandmother but formally and systematically through I.C.S. correspondence courses ordered up from Earth. They would take with them spools enough to keep them busy for at least a year and mail their completed lessons from any port they might touch. Mr. Stone was satisfied, being sure in his heart that any person skilled with mathematical tools could learn anything else he needed to know, with or without a master.

"Now, boys, about this matter of cargo-"

The twins waited; he went on: "I'll lift the stuff for you -"

"Gee, Dad, that's swell!"

"- at cost."

"You figure it and I'll check your figures. Don't try to flum­mox me or I'll stick on a penalty. If you're going to be businessmen, don't confuse the vocation with larceny."

"Right, sir. Uh... we still can't order until we know where we are going."

"True. Well, how would Mars suit you, as the first stop?"

"Mars?" Both boys got far-away looks in their eyes; their lips moved soundlessly.

"Well? Quit figuring your profits; you aren't there yet"

"Mars? Mars is fine, Dad!"

"Very well. One more thing: fail to keep up your studies and I won't let you sell a tin whistle."

"Oh, we'll study!" The twins 'got out while they were ahead. Roger Stone looked at the closed door with a fond smile on his face, an expression he rarely let them see, Good boys! Thank heaven he hadn't been saddled with a couple of obedient, well-behaved little nincompoops!

When the twins reached their own room Castor got down the general catalog of Four Planets Export. Pollux said, "Cas?"

"Don't bother me."

"Have you ever noticed that Dad always gets pushed around until he gets his own way?"

"Sure. Hand me that slide rule."